Sandy Yozipovic on Surviving Paralysis, Beating Stage 4 Cancer, and Choosing Faith Over Fear | EP 671

26:34And I'm like, they're still in their partying days. They're still like, I've got to be very careful. Don't drink. I don't do it. I was a good girl. And I I just, we just grew apart. We're still friends today, but it's very different friendships than when we were growing up. I don't like to say I outgrew them. I want to say I was on a different path completely. And so that's when I met my husband and our first dad. I didn't want to tell anybody that what I, what I had gone through because of my paralysis and my fiance, we said it was harder on him and that was over. So I was very guarded. I became very guarded in my health, in how I thought, the people I hung around.

27:13I started to become a reader, a ferocious reader on the power of positive thinking, right? Think and grow rich, these kinds of things. And just to stay on this wavelength. And I met my husband. And one of the first dates we were at, he took me to a movie and he's standing on my feet. He's standing on my foot and I didn't feel it. I couldn't feel my feet. And all of a sudden he looks down and goes, oh my gosh, why didn't you say anything? I'm like, oh, here it goes. I said, well, I can't feel my feet. So he's like, what? It became a joke to see how much I could get away with without anybody really that I had considered damaged goods.

27:50He asked me to marry him after three months. I'm like, okay, whoa, slow down, Turbo, because I'd already been told by the neurologist, three neurologists, that I would never be able to have kids. I'd have to have a desk job the rest of my life. And when you hear these from the specialists what I've learned is that has to go in one ear and out the other ear because they don't know what God's plans are for you and so I came back I had no money after being not working for a year and a half and I started waitressing and singing in a rock band on the weekends for extra money because I had to pay my parents back for my missed rent my car payment and I was doing double shifts.

28:34Probably the worst thing you could be doing after Guillain-Barre syndrome. But I found out I was very good with people and waitressing. My passion was music. My passion was going to sing. And I had a member of a rock band in Canada. My friends had taken me out. They asked my mom permission to take me out to the bar to see the top band in Saskatchewan. They were called the Northern Pikes. And my girlfriends asked my mom, can we take Sandy out for the weekend? She goes, well, she's got her two canes. I went from a wheelchair to a walker to two canes. So I'm feeling great because I'm not very good on my canes.

29:05I don't have the balance yet. So I really don't move. But I remember going to see this top band, this rock band, and all the girls leave me at the table when the band starts playing, and they're all on the dance floor. Of course, I can't do that. I'm with my canes. I'm sitting in my chair, and I'm just bopping my head and doing this the whole time. So it was so funny because the band members noticed that everybody else is up, and I'm just sitting there. Now I hide my cane under the table. Well, the lead singer, his name was Marlborough, came over, leaned down to say, why are you getting up and dancing with your friends?

29:38And then he hit one of my canes and he tripped on it when he was bending over. And I'm like, I'm so sorry. He goes, oh, I am so sorry. I said, don't worry about it. It's okay. I don't want anybody to know. So shh. So then after that, my friends then stood me up against the railing with my two canes and stood on either side of me so you know about beginning but that but i will tell you merle brick said something to me and he came to visit me one of my next i was in the hospital three different times and he drove from saskatoon before he had a show drove to reach anna and he told me he was rehearsing writing a song and he told me sandy he goes if you want to sing if that's your passion that's your love go sing nobody says you can't do that god has more in life for you god has more in store for you.

30:25And then he'd drive back and do it. And I'd be sitting there going, I can't believe the lead singer of the top band in Canada just told me to go. So that's why I went for an audition when I moved back. And then my husband and I had a rock band for the last 22 years. I did that. I was singing in a rock band until I was seven and a half months pregnant, singing like a virgin. And I went, okay, I have a shelf life with this. I'm not going to do this anymore. So your husband traded a hockey stick for a guitar? When I quit the band after I started having babies, when I realized we could have babies, I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to be a mom.

30:58But I was doing that for extra money. And then when I quit the band, all my friends and people, family were saying, can you sing at this wedding? Can you do this? I didn't play an instrument. So I'm like, okay, honey, you play guitar. You're going to learn to harmonize. And so we did. And it just grew. And then we were in some talent show in Vegas through Primerica. And they asked us if we would do a song, a couple of songs. And from there, we ended up having a band for, we played with the house band in Vegas and we were together for 20 some years, 20 since 1999. Yeah. Looking back, just to be told by a doctor, you're never going to have a normal life.

31:35You're never going to have children. My sister-in-law has a rare muscular issue. And she was also told that she would never have kids, never have a normal life. And she and my brother ended up adopting two kids and then she gets pregnant. And not only does she get pregnant, but for some reason, perhaps the hormones or something that naturally occurred, it gave her more strength than she ever had. She felt the best she'd ever had in her life. Isn't that something? She went on to have two more kids and defied the odds. But I think your wisdom that you said earlier on is when someone tells you this, don't accept it as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

32:22You have the ability. Your mind can do amazing things. Your faith can do amazing things. God can do amazing things if you put your trust that there are possibilities beyond it. And I think that's the message you're trying to bring. Yes, exactly. Exactly it. And I hear stories all the time, just like your sister-in-law, because they told me I would never be able to have children. And then I ended up having two healthy, normal children. So I'm like, okay, this is incredible. It's like when I got diagnosed with cancer. Do you want me to move on to that? Well, I was going to go into this. So it's been like 18 months now.

33:00I went and got a colonoscopy and I'm a veteran. So I do it at the VA. It's probably different than people who go to a normal clinic. But in the VA, they kind of walk you into this room that's got 10 people in it. You're all sitting five feet away from each other. They take you into the procedure individually, but then you come out and you're in this big room and I'm sitting there and the doctor hasn't come back yet to tell me how my test was, but the gentleman next to me, and I can hear this as if it's like him standing right in front of me. He says, I have some unfortunate news for you. We found a mass during the test and it's, we suspect that you have stage three colon cancer.

33:40And I'm just sitting there next to this going, oh my God, I can't believe they didn't take them out of the room to share this information. What am I going to hear? But you are told Sandy, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have colon cancer. And And not only do you have colon cancer, you have stage four colon cancer, which is a diagnosis that would take the wind out of anyone's sail. How in the world did you react? This is like 15 years, 16 years. You've overcome this one battle. You're now married. You now have kids. You must have been thinking, what in the world, God, why are you putting me through this again?

34:22That's exactly what I said. And in between the Guillain-Barre syndrome, having the kids and running a business, I'm an entrepreneur. My husband and I have 45 agencies across Canada and the U.S. So we're working our business. But I also loved to work out exercise. So I was competing. I think it was the Body for Life, I think, was back in the 90s that I was a part of. I boxed for many years just with a trainer and then started Taekwondo with the kids and realized that I really had a gift with boxing and Taekwondo and started competing in tournaments. But I knew one tournament that I won in LA was 39.

35:04I was the oldest competitor in that tournament. And my family was there, my kids were there, and I just felt off. I felt I was tired. Normally after a chant or win, you're like, whoo. And I'm like, I physically exhausted. I'm like, okay, I'm really excited, but I'm so tired. And then I started noticing that I had a hard time going to the bathroom. And then there was blood. So I went to, my doctor was with the males. I went to the male and my doctor there at that time said, well, Sandy, you're 39. You're in the best shape of your life. You look great. You look healthy. It must be just hemorrhoids.

35:40And I'm like, I've had two kids. I know what that is. and every woman knows what that is and what that feels like is that I don't think so. But because of my age and because I was looked healthy, she didn't do any further tests. So when I finally kept going, so that was now May, I go now till August, September. And now my husband, I had a lot of blood that day. And I was literally down to juicing everything because I couldn't eat anything, I'd have extreme abdominal pains. So my husband says, we're going right now and we're going to see the doctor. Well, we called the male and they said, don't bring her here, bring her straight to emergency.

36:19And so we're like, emergency? Why am I going to emergency? Well, that ended up being that day they did my test. It was early in the morning. I did my test and they said, get this, I was stage three, but they couldn't put the scope any further. When they did the colonoscopy, they couldn't get the scope in. And they said, we found a mass, but we think it's contained. And, but we need to like, have you over the weekend, just cleaning up to do that. I call it go quickly, not go lightly, but whatever that is that you have to drink. And, and by the time I went in on Tuesday, it was September 11th, 2001, which was 9-11.

36:56I'm at the Mayo at 5. AM I'm getting prepped. They're ready to do the surgery at six. And the first plane flew into the trade center. in not for 9-11. And they put a blood alert on all the hospitals. So now all the surgeries are stopped. My son and my husband are in the waiting room going, where are all the doctors going? They said, well, they've canceled all the surgeries. And Mark goes, oh, that's not good. That's not good. Because you don't know when you're going to be rescheduled. And I'm in dire straits. My surgeon, God bless him, Dr. Jacques Capel, he's retired since. And he said something nudged him.

37:31He grabbed his team and he said, I think we need to do this surgery today. Something's telling me I need to do this today. We can't put her off. I'm already under. And I'm telling you, that was the best decision he could have made for my life because I woke up and my parents weren't there. They were supposed to come to watch the kids. My parents were driving down. My brother-in-law was in the air to come. His plane had to land in Minneapolis, so he couldn't go. He's stranded there. So my father-in-law had to go pick him up from Canada. My parents can't get car across the border until they open the border.

38:07So we had nobody to watch our kids. And that's when the doctor, when I woke up, the doctor, Mark said to me, he goes, okay, honey, he goes, I'm just going to tell you the surgery was done. They got everything they could, but your tumor was doubling in size every 24, 48 hours, you're stage four. So I was three on Friday, but that's how fast it had gone from May until September. But I'm a believer now, you have to be your own advocate. You know your body. And I knew I was exhausted. I knew I had issues. Even though I looked healthy from the outside, it was not my body. I was dying on the inside.

38:46And that's exactly the best way to describe it as I was. So in that surgery, they had to remove the damage had been done. They had to remove 14 inches of my intestine. They had to rebuild my rectum, remove two thirds of that. It had gone through the intestinal, into the ovaries. I had a spot on my liver, but that ended up just being calcium. And then through the lymphatics, it was in 65 % of my lymph nodes in that whole area. So battle was on. Because if you've got aggressive cancer like that, it's like, what do we do next? So the standard is when you're diagnosed with that. The surgical command, you too need some time to process this.

39:24I'll give you a minute. And I said, no, what's the next step? and he's like what's the next step let's go what do we do time is of the essence i don't have time to waste her what are we doing here well we need to wait six weeks before we can do any chemo radiation after the surgery but it's going to be six months and i'm just telling you the odds are 30 chance of survival 99 chance it'll be back its first year like we don't believe we can this might not be long term you probably need to get your affairs in order do you need a moment I go, why would I waste time? I don't need a moment. What are we doing?

40:02What can I do in the meantime? So in the meantime, we'd already gotten to our company, our founder of the company, Art Williams, had arranged for me to get an appointment at Sloan Kettering. Mark and I were on the first flight back to when the flights finally started flying after 9-11. We were heading to New York to Sloan Kettering for a second opinion. well that was when I broke down and cried I will tell you that was when I broke down and cried because I'm you pretty tough because I can handle a lot and that one got me because the surgeon said there I gotta share this with you in between going to Sloan Kettering I had two weeks and I'm in the hospital my husband is going there's got to be another way I don't believe that if we're in the 20 % wait, there's got to be another way.

40:48So he talked to a trainer at our gym, my boxing trainer, and said, you go see this naturopath, this doctor over here, go see him. So Mark, while I'm in the hospital, he went to see this naturopath. This doctor teaches him how you get cancer. The foods we eat can be toxic to our body. Well, I was on the body for life. So all the diet coke, all the protein fillers and protein bars were, I had way too much protein for my blood type in my system, it actually sped up my cancer by 15 years. So I was poisoning myself with my nutrition that I thought I was in the healthy zone. I was not. It was all processed junk.

41:26And so that was my first lesson on nutrition. So Mark takes me out of the hospital. We go see, he goes, that doctor can't help, but this new doctor who's outside the box thinker, he just graduated, he's got opening up his practice. And that night on Friday night, I get out of the hospital in the mail. On Friday night, we go see Dr. Dino Prado. And we walked into the boardroom. He's at the air park. And he's in an office sharing complex. His father had an office there. He's a doctor of psychology. Had an office there. And so Dr. Dino was using the boardroom to see patients. And the waiting room was filled with people sitting there getting IVs with IV poles in just regular chairs.

42:06I'm like, first of all, what doctor only sees you after 6 o 'clock at night? because he wasn't his practice wasn't open till Monday I'm going Friday when I get out of the hospital so Mark dragged me over there I'm cut all the way up my body and I end up walking in the boardroom and there's Dr. Dino Prado 26 years old and I said to my husband okay Doogie Howser's gonna save me now this can't be true and then I recognized Dino he was working out at the gym the entire four years that he was going to college and we were working out and we'd see each other and say hi to each other. So we knew who we were, each other.

42:42We didn't know anything about each other. And all I know is he said, come see me on Monday. I'm going to be, what you have is really bad set. He goes, I'm going to be honest. He goes, I don't know if I can help. But he said, if you're 100 % coachable to what I ask you to do, you've got a shot. And I went, I've got a shot? Well, I've been told I haven't had many shots before in my life. And if you're telling me I got a shot, I'm going with that shot. So I believe what helped me is I'm a believer in you've got to do whatever it takes to stack the odds in your favor. And what made sense to me is when you oxygenate the blood and you clean out the blood and you high dose vitamin C IVs is a great combination for rebuilding that immune system while you're detoxing the blood.

43:34I believe I was stacking the odds in my favors. I stopped going to the mail after four months. I changed my diet. I was literally there every five hours to seven hours a day at Dino's clinic. But I want to tell you when I went to Sloan Kettering, so now I'm getting my third opinion because I've already been to Dino doing my IVs. I'm already up to 130 ,000 milligrams of liquid vitamin C in my IVs a day. I go to Sloan Kettering and the guy there, Sloan Kettering has a floor for every body part. So my husband says I was on the butthole floor. We get there and the doctor, God bless him, but he just sat there and Mark said, well, we've got five questions to ask you.

44:13We've asked about nutrition. Number one, what do you do to rebuild the immune system? And what number three, by number three, we didn't even get number three out. And the doctor says, who have you been talking to? And we both stopped and we looked at each other. He was bothered by it, that we were asked, this is the head of Sloan Kettering for the colon department. And he's a specialist. The founder put me in front of it. I'm like, okay. So he got a little hostile. And he goes, a naturopath. They're quackery. Oh, they're just going to take your money. Nutrition has nothing to do with it. And I'm like, nutrition is why I'm in this place right now talking to you.

44:54And he says, well, let me see your star. Well, I had already been putting a wool chamois with castor oil and a kiwi pad twice a day. So Dr. Dino told me to do. to heal that scar and that pastoral oil will seek into the innards so that it'll start the healing process. I lay down on the table. My scar is already flesh colored. You could not tell. I had a zipper, but you could barely see it. It was flesh colored already. And he says, he's looking and he goes, oh, he goes, wow. So when was your surgery? Four or five months ago? I go two and a half weeks. And he went, what? And that's when I knew I was sticking with Dr.

45:33Prado because they'd never seen that turnaround for that type of surgery. And I've been with Dr. Prado ever since. I'm an advocate for health. I'm an advocate for medical freedom. I'm an advocate for doctors in the medical field. God bless them and God love them, but they only know what they've been taught and what they've been told to know. And you've got to find someone who thinks outside the box. You have to believe medical freedom is here. It's now after COVID, the COVID situation or sham, whatever you want to call it. I saw it for what it was. I warned everybody to not take those COVID shots because I've already been vaccinated.

46:12When you see the Guillain-Barre syndrome is in the top 10 side effects, why would you want to put that in your body? That's a lot. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. It's just eye-opening. If there was one thing you wanted to leave the listeners with, like one takeaway that you want to make sure they hear, what would it be? There's a cure for cancer and there is definitely life after cancer, even autoimmune disease. The Invita Medical Center is where I was treated. And I have been with Dr. Prada. He was 26 years old. I was already an entrepreneur and in business. And I realized that doctors are great at doctoring.

46:55And Dr. Dino's a creator. He's a scientist. It's been decades since this treatment. So you had basically close to zero odds that you were going to survive 20 plus years later, you're here talking to the audience. I still meet with patients every week. I'm not an employee of Invita Medical Center. I believe I'm there to help assist the sick to help stack the odds in their favor for their complete healing. And I've seen miracles from autoimmune immune disease with Lyme disease, Lyme infections, because the Lyme disease is what sped up my cancer as well. So you have Guillain-Barre, Lyme, cancer. And Vita Medical Center has saved five of my own close family members, my father, my sister, my niece, my sister-in-law, and myself.

47:42Just because it's not mainstream, just because it's not popular, does not mean it doesn't work. The medical system is built to make money. There's no money in a cure. And I learned that in 2001, this was a big business. And now I'm up against big pharma. And so when I realized, I said, well, so these treatments, these high dose vitamin C, when you combine it with oxibor, you're stacking the odds. They've known about this since the 1930s. The scientist was given a Nobel Peace Prize. Why don't these hospitals do it? If it's curing people, if it's giving them that shot and that hope, but here's how insurance controlled everything.

48:23insurance won't cover it. So what we did is that Invita during COVID is they hired a physicist and spent millions of dollars. The guy spent two and a half years building 6 ,000 CPT billable codes. So we launched the first ever innovative, integrative healthcare plan last year with, that covers every doctor. You have to get out of the network. Think of not the matrix. This is every doctor you can go see. If you want to go to Mayo, Sloan, it's covered, but also Invita Medical Center, which is deemed as centers of excellence because they have 35 times greater outcomes with stage four patients than every other cancer center in North America.

49:03This is huge. So the world is changing. Now that RFK Jr. is in there, the world is going to become better in the healthcare space. I've been working with legislation in the state of Arizona. I'm working now with DC for all states to now have we're going after medicare because when medicare changes their verbiage and their laws the rest of the insurance companies follow and so we're working on changing the verbiage that in that these billable codes that invita has prepared harry over they will be able to cover these so people will not have to pay for their care that works that's natural advanced technology that can heal them.

49:44They're curing stage four pancreatic cancer, stage four lung cancer brain in eight weeks, 12 weeks. This is unheard of in the 2.0. Think of it as a 2.0 medical model. That's our conventional traditional. We need that. We need our surgeons. We need our emergency. We need our paramedics. We need all that. But you need a 3.0 for the internal, for the nutrition guide, for the advanced technology. You're not administering PEMO as a poison. You're not just taking radiation. You can do a target. You can do more of a rebuild your natural killer cells naturally. And that's like a army going after this little baby.

50:22So it's, you can really stack the odds in your favor if you're in that 3.0 model. So that's my mission now is God has moved me. I really believe I'm just a professional patient that has a story to tell that I can relate to most people when they're in that tunnel, when they're in the grind of dealing with that disease in the body, but you can reset the immune system a hundred percent of the time. You can reset. We just got to get our minds out of the 2.0 system and be open to 3.0. And that's what I'm working to change in the U.S. for sure. And eventually globally. God has it in my heart with global.

51:00So I'm going with that. Well, Sandy, it was such an honor to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for being vulnerable with your story and sharing this with our audience. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. I know I talk a lot. I hope they can follow what I share, but this really is good to help get the word out. There is hope out there. Never give up. Never give up looking for it. That's a wrap on today's conversation with Sandy Yazopovic, and what an extraordinary way to close out our Decoding Humanity series. Here are three takeaways that I hope you carry forward this week. Resilience isn't built in the absence of hardship.

51:35It's forged in the fire of it. Faith and courage are not feelings. They're daily choices, even when fear is loud. And your story, no matter how painful, can become a source of healing for others. Over the past four weeks, we've explored what it really means to be human. Our brains and emotions, our hidden wounds, our moral choices, our need for belonging. Sandy's story reminds us that even in our most vulnerable moments, we have the power to rise. Next week, we begin a brand new series, The Forces We Cannot See. Every day, invisible forces shape what we notice, the choices we make, and the lives we build.

52:09In this four-week series, we'll explore those pulls, from doubt to luck, from ethics to culture, and uncover how to work with them, not against them, to live more intentionally. We'll kick off with Dr. Brennan Spiegel about his new book, Pull, How Gravity Shapes Your Body, Steadies the Mind, and Guides Our Health. We'll explore how gravity influences everything from posture to mood, and how building gravity resilience may be the key to better health. I think about our psychology and what do we do as humans. We are trying to find patterns in chaos. We are surrounded by entropy, by a world that's trying to pull us apart, both physically, emotionally, and in many other domains.

52:50And what we do as humans is we make sense of the world, the physical input into our bodies, which is part of what this new book is about, emotional inputs? And how do we create a coherent narrative in our mind's eye that allows us to find patterns that allow us to survive and thrive? And behavioral economics is a set of tools to do that efficiently. But psychologically, that's what we're doing. And that's what AI is starting to teach us in terms of how we go about doing that. If today's conversation moved you, pay the fee. Share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it. And if you haven't yet, leave a five-star rating or review on Apple or Spotify.

53:26It's the best way to help more people find the show. Until next time, notice the forces that are pulling you. Lead with intention, and as always, live life passion-struck.